A Fairy Tale Gone Wrong: Social media,Recursive Hate and the Politicisation of Drag Queen Storytime

Anti-LGBTQ Politics and Homonormativity

Outrage against DQS reflects the episodic invocation of a ‘sexual emergency’. ⁵⁷ Such ‘emergencies’ might include prejudice-based government policies and ‘… defensiveness, rage, and nostalgia among ordinary citizens who liked it better when their sexuality could be assumed to be general for the population as a whole’. ⁵⁸ This protest reflects the tension between sexual citizenship as a method of achieving broader rights bearing inclusion for LGBTQ communities and the enhanced capacity to generate partisan outrage through digital media technologies. ⁵⁹

Bias-motivated hateful conduct against DQS readers originates in a broader politics of white grievance and related theories of ‘white genocide’. ⁶⁰ This grievance can be expressed through simplistic framing and language of ‘tactical speech’ that seeks to communicate directly and persuasively to a broader audience. ⁶¹ In the context of outrage and protest against DQS, this framing perpetuates representations of gender fluidity as deviant, and a threat to children. As Russell has noted, tactical speech can erase complexity and reinforce essentialist assumptions and dominant ideas about class and respectability. ⁶² At the same time, this speech excludes certain LGBTQ groups from what Duggan has called the ‘new homonormativity’ of sexual politics in neoliberal discourse. This discourse normalises and assimilates certain kinds of sexual orientation and gender identity into mainstream culture through domesticity and consumption. ⁶³ For example, homonormative discourse in relation to protest against DQS can include toleration of homosexuality but can exclude the gender fluidity of drag performance; a person might not ‘…oppose diversity and gays’, but does ‘… object to having transsexual [sic] individuals telling stories to “impressionable young children” at a public library’. ⁶⁴ This perspective can also intersect with ‘liberal’ economic arguments against expression of gender fluidity in publicly funded premises based on inaccurate claims about expenditure of public resources on DQS events. US First Amendment freedom of speech protections and the subsequent reluctance of digital platforms to regulate speech online, in part to protect digital platform non-publisher status, and therefore limit digital platform liability, ⁶⁵ have arguably amplified tactical speech online, and in person.

The disruption of a DQS event in a Brisbane inner city library in January 2020 by members of the conservative University of Queensland Liberal National Club speaks to aspects of these elements of protest against DQS events. Protesters stated that they were defending values against a corrosive gender ideology supported by ratepayer funds. Police were called to the library after it was reported that the protesters were upsetting the children there for the DQS event, however security had moved the protesters on before police arrived. ⁶⁶ Wilson Gavin, who was gay and campaigned against same-sex marriage in Australia, took his own life after a recording of the disruption of the DQS event went viral and which included Wilson at the front of the group shouting at one of the two hosts. ⁶⁷ The video generated social media traffic on Twitter and Facebook with the hashtag #IStandWithQueens, while other footage from the event shows the protesters being confrontational with organisers. This incident shows the tensions and complexities of negotiating gender and sexual orientation diversity through sexual citizenship and ‘homonormative’ discourse, the distributive elements of this discourse, ⁶⁸ the enhanced capacity to generate partisan outrage through digital media technologies, ⁶⁹ and its potentially tragic consequences.

Domestic Extremism and Western Liberal ‘Homonationalism’

Bias-motivated reactions to DQS are caught up in a still broader, global context of the tension between the framing of Western liberal democracies as ‘tolerant’ and ‘civilized’ ‘homonationalist’ cultures, ^{70 , 71} and Christian and domestic hate and far right groups who might challenge these claims within those cultures. Protest against DQS in Western liberal democracies speaks to the deeper ‘…complexities of how “acceptance” and “tolerance” for gay and lesbian subjects have become a barometer by which the right to, and capacity for national sovereignty is evaluated’. ⁷² Complicating this binary, and concurrent with the advent of DQS and the political and technological context of the Trump presidency, is an increased threat of domestic extremism in many Western liberal democracies. For example, the greatest terrorism threat to US homeland security is now domestic extremists. ⁷³ In 2020, MI5 stated that violent right-wing extremism was a major threat in the UK, and that the threat of far-right plots was only second to Islamic terrorism. ⁷⁴ In Australia, 30–40% of counter-terrorism work conducted by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation is now to combat right-wing extremism, up from approximately 10 and 15 per cent prior to 2016. ⁷⁵ The starkest example of the intersection of hate rhetoric, right-wing extremism and the use of social media to amplify messages of hate and their translation into in-person violence is the Christchurch terrorist attack in New Zealand in March 2019. An Australian self-identified member of the alt-right movement attacked two mosques, murdering 51 people and attempting to murder a further 40, ⁷⁶ and which he live-streamed through Facebook to share with his virtual community. ⁷⁷

At the geopolitical level, Weber has argued that the absence of a global queer theory is symptomatic of the absence of queer perspectives within international relations theory. ⁷⁸ Arguably, this absence represents an omission that does not recognise the contribution of queer theory to complex issues such as the intersection of sexuality, gender identity, procreation, religion, domestic extremism and digital media technologies manifested in-person and online protest against DQS events noted in this article, and which digiqueer criminology seeks to interrogate.

Defining Hateful Conduct

Hate crime can been defined as a spectrum of perpetrator conduct ‘…motivated, at least in part, by bias, prejudice, hatred or animosity towards the group affiliation of the victim. Secondly, is a victim who belongs, or is presumed to belong, to a group that is recognised as the object of prejudice or group hatred’. ⁷⁹ Hate crime is generally directed towards a class of people, and as such, the individual victim is often not significant to the offender and may be a stranger to him or her. ⁸⁰ The classification of an act as a hate crime covers a broad range of offences, across a diverse range of victim groups. In the US, a hate crime is defined by the FBI as a criminal offence with an added element of bias ‘… against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender's bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity’. ⁸¹ Hate itself is not a crime in the US, and is protected under freedom of speech and other civil liberties. ⁸² First Amendment free speech protections in the United States are in tension, for example, with the Fourteenth Amendment's implicit promise of dignity and equality, ⁸³ and demonstrate the limits of the criminal law in addressing hate speech online that might subsequently translate into further hateful conduct in person, and vice versa. Despite this, Williams et al have found ‘… a consistent positive association between Twitter hate speech targeting race and religion and offline racially and religiously aggravated offences in London’. ⁸⁴ In addition, their study confirmed the association between events that acted as ‘triggers’, such as terror attacks, political votes and court cases, for online and offline hate acts. Furthermore, they found an association in the absence of ‘trigger’ events (emphasis added). ⁸⁵ This finding speaks to the patterned nature of bias-motivated hateful conduct that requires analysis beyond individual incidents. It also speaks to the mutually constituted relationship between online and in-person hateful conduct against DQS events and the actualisation and amplification of latent, bias-motivated threats of direct and indirect violence through digital platforms.

In the UK, the Crown Prosecution Service uses hate crime to describe a range of criminal behaviour where the perpetrator is motivated by hostility or demonstrates hostility towards a victim's ‘protected characteristics’ of disability, race, religion, sexual orientation or transgender identity. ⁸⁶ A hate crime in the UK can include verbal abuse, intimidation, threats, harassment, assault and bullying, as well as damage to property. The perpetrator can also be a friend, carer or acquaintance who exploits their relationship with the victim for financial gain or some other criminal purpose. ⁸⁷

In Australian jurisdictions legislation can prohibit public acts of vilification, verbal abuse and hatred, on a range of grounds including race, religion, sexual orientation and gender identity. ‘Some statutes contain civil proscriptions and processes alone, whilst other Acts additionally establish criminal offences. The criminal proscriptions usually require an additional element — that the perpetrator has threatened, or has incited others to threaten physical harm to a person or their property’ ⁸⁸ (i.e. they would be already covered under criminal codes). However, in NSW in 2018, a new offence was created of ‘…publicly threatening or inciting violence on the grounds of race, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity or intersex or HIV/AIDS status’, ⁸⁹ and which speaks to the context in which violent reactions to DQS events have occurred.

Broader bias-motivated conduct in reaction to DQS events include forms of indirect violence such as threats to funding, increased oversight of decision-making on public events held at public libraries, postponement or cancellation of DQS events because of threats to public safety and/or the prohibitive cost of policing to ensure the safety of DQS events, and civil litigation. These broader strictures on LGBTQ expression emphasise the merit in applying ‘digiqueer’ criminology as a frame to evaluate the impact of digital media technologies on processes of enfranchisement and exclusion for LGBTQ communities and institutional legitimacy.

The Inter-Relationship between Sexuality, Christianity and Nationalism

Bjork-James argues that a common trait of nationalist groups is to claim victimhood while advocating the right to discriminate. She further argues that religious right Christian nationalists ‘… made a religious value of heterosexual privilege a political mandate to shape state policy by framing Christians as the rightful determiners of state policy’. ⁹⁰ Bjork-James suggests that biased behaviour is a secondary effect of this moral order. ⁹¹ The rhetorical strategy of claiming victimhood while advocating the right to discriminate is reflected in protests against DQS that distress children through the disruption of such events, the intimidation of staff and drag queen presenters, and the need for an increased public and/or private security presence to safely host DQS events. ⁹² Underpinning this bias is a conflation of ‘Christian’ and ‘national’ concerns based on a notion of sexual purity that pairs individual morality and national strength. ⁹³ Bjork-James thus concludes that there is a strong relationship between sexual politics and evangelical politics in jurisdictions where there is a strong and politically organised movement that believes in a national sexuality that is integral to maintaining the moral and reproductive rights of the nation. The decoupling of Christian sexual morality from the legal institutions of the state through LGBTQ rights is a new form of secularism inscribed in law that threatens the privilege of such groups. ⁹⁴ At the same time, discriminatory politics can be rooted in a moral system and nationalist imaginary that defines others as outside the bounds of one's community. ⁹⁵ Consequently, this ‘moral citizenship’ might accommodate bias manifested as violence. ‘Sincerity’ has become a common measure of such moral citizenship, particularly in the adjudication of religious freedom cases in the US ‘…where the sincerity of a religious subject is often measured in legal cases to determine whether or not they have experienced discrimination’. ⁹⁶ Concurrently, the backlash against DQS reflects the amplificatory capacity and hazards of digital platforms in an era of hyper-partisanship fuelled by the diversification of media platforms and the polarisation of political rhetoric notable in the US, the UK and Australia.

The notion of an ‘androgynous mean’ borne of ‘… the sexual revolution's reconfiguring of the human ecosystem’ ⁹⁷ is an additional aspect of the debate over gender identity and gender fluidity. This argument suggests that androgyny, and its instantiations of gender fluidity and gender ambiguity, operates ‘… as a mechanism for reconstructing the extended family/community in prosthetic form in a time when the actual Western extended family/community is in decline’. ⁹⁸ Ostensibly harmless DQS childhood literacy programmes are alleged to conceal the primary objective of indoctrinating and recruiting children into the alleged aberrant drag lifestyle because drag queens cannot ‘reproduce’. ⁹⁹ This argument frames the gender fluidity debate as a tension between traditional notions of family predicated on the procreative contract between married men and women and the tribalism of broader gender identity politics harnessed through digital media.

This apocalyptic vision of procreative decline conflates gender fluidity with a reproductive scarcity that endangers the enterprise of Western civilisation. This is despite access to in vitro fertilisation and the extension of adoption and marriage rights to same-sex attracted people in some Western liberal jurisdictions. Conservative Christian anti-LGBTQ hate group activism, and far-right anti-LGBTQ reactions to DQS in the US are tied up in deeper debates of white grievance interconnected with such notions of cultural primacy. Fringe spaces on the internet such as 4chan, 8chan and Reddit have been integral in accommodating this grievance and its translation into a growing wave of violent actions by white nationalists worldwide. ¹⁰⁰ These actions are part of a victimisation narrative perpetrated by people of white ethnicity under the auspices of the ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracy theory. ¹⁰¹ This conspiracy theory, and related theories of ‘white genocide’, claim that the genetic and cultural heritage of white people, in the United States and other countries, is under threat by means of miscegenation and forced assimilation with non-White immigrants. ¹⁰²

Co-option of DQS by religious and political conservatives as reflective of the degeneracy of conventional ‘liberalism’ is another aspect of protest against DQS. ¹⁰³ Political debates about ‘liberalism’ and nationhood have been charged by an incivility deemed necessary by some conservatives to regain the political and moral ground allegedly lost by conservatives since the late 1960s, particularly in the United States. ¹⁰⁴ The broader implication of claims from conservatives who reject the right to express divergent viewpoints is that they seemingly advocate a revision of freedom of expression norms based on ‘higher good’ rhetoric that excludes divergent viewpoints. ¹⁰⁵ Conversely, drag queens reading to children in public libraries can be seen as reflective of the domestication of the ‘cultural left’, whose mainstream rights focus for LGBT people has for some time been the family-friendly focus of marriage and children, not sexual liberation. ¹⁰⁶ This perspective speaks to the homonormalisation of marriage and procreation for same-sex attracted people through sexual citizenship discourse. The deeper political significance of conservative reactions to DQS in the US is its embodiment of the fracturing of the ‘fusionist’ coalition of the modern right, which had long united social conservatives, economic libertarians and foreign policy hawks. ¹⁰⁷

‘Deceptive’ Bodies and Drag Queen Storytime as a Site of Hyper-Partisanship

Demonising rhetoric grounded in harmful pseudoscience that portrays LGBTQ people as threats to children, society and public health are central themes of anti-LGBTQ organising and ideology in opposition to LGBTQ rights, including the organising of anti-LGBTQ hate groups. ¹⁰⁸ Goldberg has noted that the perceived risks of DQS to childhood meaning-making of identity are somewhat skewed in a political environment that has seen the rise of right-wing extremism in the US. ¹⁰⁹ Protest to DQS from right-wing extremists who incite violence online and then may translate this violence into in-person bias-motivated hateful conduct, or vice versa, demonstrates that the legacy of legal and medical stigma of same-sex attraction and gender fluidity based on claims of their harmfulness to children are close to the surface. That this conduct might be carried out in public institutions such as libraries, in some instances by armed protestors, and to the visible distress of children, speaks to elements of Bjork-James’ argument about the exclusivity of moral citizenship that might go beyond religious affiliation. The ease with which these sentiments can be amplified through social media speak to Williams et al's identification of a more general pattern of correlation between online hate speech targeting race and religion and offline racially and religiously aggravated crimes independent of ‘trigger’ events. ¹¹⁰ As noted above, broader justifications of hateful conduct against drag queens reading to children in public spaces are predicated on the age inappropriateness of ‘adult’ drag queen performers reading to children, and the use of public resources to cater to the ‘corruption’ of childhood innocence. ¹¹¹

To varying degrees, and dependant on jurisdiction, the themes discussed in this article emphasise the recursive conflation of gender fluidity, same-sex attraction and transgender identity with deviance to justify hateful conduct. Negative reactions to DQS reflect the intersection of expression rights that recognise LGBTQ inclusion and diversity through sexual citizenship discourse and moral objections to expression of these rights based on arguments of sexual purity that eschew gender fluidity. Underscoring hyper-partisan political debate over DQS are objections to gender fluidity that originate in the legal preoccupation with categorising bodies as procreative binaries rather than, as Brooks and Thompson have argued, reaching a judgement as to the ethical balance, for example, in determining consent in cases that involve gender fluidity. ¹¹² This categorisation through the criminal law might perpetuate stigmatisation of gender fluidity through the framing of gender fluid bodies as ‘deceptive’, ‘gender deviant’, or bodies to be ‘feared’. ¹¹³ Some DQS protestors extrapolate the ‘deceptive’ framing of gender fluidity of drag performance to paedophilia, a label which perpetuates the legacy of same-sex attraction and gender fluidity as deviant. ¹¹⁴

Claims of religious, moral and cultural superiority in the face of the failure of religious institutions to protect children against institutional child sex abuse speak to the durability of faith-based tactical speech ^{115 , 116} that can perpetuate systemic harms against vulnerable populations. The doxing of a drag performer in Austin Texas noted above, ¹¹⁷ taps into the notion of gender fluidity as deceptive. At the same time, the use of doxing against transgender performers, parents who take their children to DQS events, and anti-DQS politicians, speaks to the pernicious and pervasive nature of doxing as a structured, technological harm, and a hate tactic across the political spectrum.

Structural Violence, Social media and the Hate Feedback Loop

The ongoing importance of recognition for LGBTQ rights is grounded in the failure of criminal justice institutions to invoke the criminal law in Western liberal democracies in the second half of the 20^th century in response to claims of discrimination by minority groups. ¹¹⁸ This included extreme violence against groups such as African Americans, Roma and gays and lesbians. This failure perpetuated the criminalisation, pathologisation and stigmatisation of LGBTQ communities and others, and which engendered the hate crime movement that invoked identity politics as an organising strategy. ¹¹⁹ At the same time, the establishment of a legitimate media frame for LGBTQ sexual citizenship discourse in Western liberal democracies through the identity politics movement has developed a reasonable capacity for some of those communities to resist ongoing and new forms of marginalisation through social and political organising. However, the ongoing necessity to resource campaigns to secure basic relationship rights for communities whose political status cannot be taken for granted, such as LGBTQ communities, and for freedom from state interference in jurisdictions where same-sex conduct is still criminalised and pathologized, further exemplifies the channelling away of resources from such communities. This is in contrast to rights bearing citizens who do not need to secure or defend such basic rights through political campaigning.

Conversely, Russell has argued that knowledgeable and mobilised queer movements ‘… that elicit formal apologies have been more successful [than anti-hate crime activism] in drawing attention to systemic harms perpetrated by powerful institutions of law, medicine and policing…’ (emphasis in original). ¹²⁰ She notes the shortcomings of hate crime campaigns that ‘… may redirect public attention away from structural patterns of social marginalisation that cannot be effectively framed in individual terms’. ¹²¹ Russell emphasises the need to recognise the ways in which police power, for example, may have been reworked, but not reduced. ¹²² The shifting contours of sexual citizenship through ‘… LGBT rights campaigns have challenged, altered, and buttressed systems of policing and law’, ¹²³ and continue to do so through the aspects of ‘digiqueer’ criminology explored herein.

Keck has argued, however, that despite the backlash to courtroom victories for LGBT rights provoking conservative counter-mobilisation, that such victories through legal mobilisation have sometimes been a promising avenue for pursuing policy changes whose prospects were otherwise quite limited. ¹²⁴ As noted above, while DQS has become a focus for Christian conservatives, Christian anti-LGBTQ hate groups, and far-right groups, and the backlash has included direct and indirect violence, the longer-term outcomes vary by jurisdiction but do demonstrate resilience and normalisation of DQS events through the continued staging of such events. At the same time, majority group claims of victim status through the invocation of rhetorical and recursive tactical speech based on spoiled frames of LGBTQ identity ¹²⁵ emphasise the limitations of identity politics as a political organising strategy, and the limitations of prioritising violence as a frame through which to seek redress.

The translation of threats online to threats in person, and vice versa, and the translation of discriminatory beliefs into discriminatory policy in a ‘feedback loop’, ¹²⁶ speak to the interrelationship between direct and indirect violence and the perpetuation of structural violence against LGBTQ people through digital media technologies, in-person, and through civil litigation. This can generate a ‘hate feedback loop’ through networked protest and the amplification of that protest through social media and its subsequent oscillation between mainstream media and social media, and in-person protest. ¹²⁷ This feedback loop speaks to Williams et al's identification of a more general pattern of correlation between online hate speech targeting race and religion and offline racially and religiously aggravated crimes independent of ‘trigger’ events. ¹²⁸ A political climate of permissiveness of hateful conduct and a media culture of permissiveness of hateful conduct up until mid 2020, ^{129 , 130} are arguably forms of structural violence that have manifested in actual violence. This integration of the social and the digital speaks to the limits of the criminal law in checking hateful speech in the US due to the unqualified invocation of First Amendment speech protections that do not consider the implicit promise of dignity and equality in the Fourteenth Amendment. ¹³¹ However, and while acknowledging that some digital platforms have made their polices on hateful conduct more explicit, ¹³² the digital platforms that have the largest reach in English are US-owned, and therefore consider their broad policy parameters on hateful conduct with US freedom of speech protections and their non-publisher status in mind. ¹³³

The range of criminal, civil and distributive protest against DQS noted in this article is a continuation of the ‘stricturing’ nature of structural violence through digital media technologies that allow for inter-jurisdictional networked protest, and which represents the reinterpretation and application of structural violence over time. ¹³⁴ Despite the decriminalisation of same-sex conduct in recent decades in the US, the UK and Australia, and the progression of marriage equality in many Western liberal democracies including the US, the UK and Australia, the structural legacies of the criminalisation of same-sex conduct are still inflicting their harm in these, and many other jurisdictions. Sixty-eight United Nations (UN) member states have laws that explicitly criminalise consensual same-sex sexual acts. ¹³⁵ At the same time, 32 UN member states have introduced or interpreted provisions to restrict the freedom of expression in relation to sexual orientation and gender identity issues. In terms of future areas of focus for digiqueer criminology, these provisions include laws and regulations that prohibit media or web content as well as propaganda laws that prohibit the promotion of ‘homosexuality’ or ‘non-traditional’ sexual relations. Forty-one UN member states have laws that restrict the possibilities of registering or running NGOs that work on sexual orientation issues. ¹³⁶

‘Sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression change efforts’ (SOGIECE) (otherwise known as ‘conversion therapy’ or ‘ex-gay therapy’) might still include interventions such as ‘electroshock aversion therapy’, ‘chemical aversion therapy’, ‘internment in clinics or camps’ and ‘exorcism and spiritual/miracle cures’. ¹³⁷ This catalogue of legal, medical and moral proscription is in spite of the progress made in some jurisdictions to expunge historical same-sex offences, enact marriage equality and legislate against conversion therapies. ¹³⁸ Overall, this data emphasises the variability in, and political expediency of rights enfranchisement in communities whose political status cannot be taken for granted. ¹³⁹ The medico-legal and pseudo-scientific pathologisation and criminalisation of same-sex attraction and gender fluidity noted in this article, and its amplification through the mutually constituted relationship between online and offline networks, speaks to the utility of digiqueer criminology as a frame to analyse the range of harms perpetrated against LGBTQ communities, and how they are legitimised in public discourse.